The Most Happy
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Anne Boleyn: A King's Obsession
By Alison Weir
Ballantine Books, 2017
Much to the delight of novelists and much to the continued employment of historians, the six wives of King Henry VIII have always been easy to over-simplify. The first wife is a long-suffering saint, poor Catherine of Aragon, the Spanish daughter of a mighty king and queen, wife to Henry's older brother Arthur and virtual hostage in England for long years after Arthur's premature death, finally married to Henry only to provide him with nearly a decade of dead babies. The second wife is drawn in sharp contrast to the first: Anne Boleyn, trained at the French court in the subtle arts of allurement, driving Henry wild both with a most un-English sensuality and with the promise of a male heir – and sent to the block when both the allurement and the promise failed. The third wife is the pure English madonna, calm, ethereal Jane Seymour, who agreed with everything Henry said, gave him his longed-for male heir, and then neatly died before familiarity could breed contempt. The fourth wife is the much-needed comic interlude that all historical pageants require, the plump Düseldorfian Anne of Cleves, brought from overseas to cement a religious alliance and dowered off virtually the instant Henry clapped eyes on her. The fifth wife is the return of the sinner, another Howard family temptress, Catherine, young enough to entrance the aging king and not old enough to imagine the danger she was in until the danger claimed her head. The sixth wife is the partial return of the English madonna, Catherine Parr, a scholar, a widow, and a warm mother to Henry's growing children – a marriage cut short like the third one by death, only this time his, not hers.
Every one of these marriages was more than its mythology. Around the wimple of Queen Catherine's black Spanish headdress hovered the very real threat of a European invasion of England; behind the shy smiles of Jane Seymour lay the wolfish ambition of the Seymour clan; beneath the smiling complacency of Anne of Cleves a shrewd Continental operator worked her wiles; throughout the quick tragedy of Catherine Howard was braided the brutal power-games of her family; alongside the caring-governess Catherine Parr stood a sharp-brained reformer who may have reshaped England if power had remained in her hands. Biographers have been profitably broadening and deepening the stories of these unhappy women for centuries, either dispelling the mythology in favor of studied biographical insight or amplifying the mythology in favor of a rattling good yarn.
No wife of Henry VIII provokes both of those impulses more than Anne Boleyn. She has all the elements of melodrama, not pieces here and there like the other wives. Her father was an ambitious courtier and her mother was a member of the powerful Howard clan, and her sister Mary had been Henry VIII's mistress while Anne was serving as lady-in-waiting to the French queen and immersing herself in the French court. But she was back at the English Court by 1522 and soon the focus of a small crowd of would-be suitors. One of these, Harry Percy, son of the powerful Earl of Northumberland, made a greater impression than the rest, and the two were secretly pledged to each other, a match Henry's all-powerful Cardinal Wolsey squashed the instant he became aware of it. Percy was promised elsewhere, and by 1526 Anne was dealing with the romantic overtures of a rather different lover: the King of England.
She led Henry on a long courtly dance of enticement and denial while his ministers sought with increasing energy to win an annulment of his marriage to Queen Catherine from the Pope. Anne was charismatic and beguiling, and she offered Henry the prospect of a male heir, and the two were married in 1533. No living male heirs came, and soon enough Anne was imprisoned on a wide range of charges from treason to adultery to incest. In May of 1536 she was beheaded on Tower Green, with Henry, already besotted with Jane Seymour, seeming not to pay the matter much attention anymore.
The general arc of this narrative – the tangle of romantic and sexual attraction, the enormous consequences arising from a love affair, the dynamic interplay of the personal and the political – has always been irresistible to biographers, playwrights, and novelists. Anne is the pole star: so obscure that she wasn't even Henry's first dalliance in her own family (his third, if one believes the entirely credible rumors that he started decades earlier with Anne's mother), she rose to pinnacle of English society almost entirely on the strength of her own wiles and personality, and the fact that her daughter went on to become one of the greatest English monarchs seems to act as a posthumous vindication of a woman who seems to have been, even allowing for the bias of some primary accounts, deeply unpleasant. The elements combine into a story that has always sounded at least as fictional as factual.
When it comes to that story of Anne Boleyn, the popular Tudor biographer and historical novelist is on exceedingly familiar ground. In 1991 she wrote The Six Wives of Henry VIII, in 1996 she wrote Children of England: The Heirs of King Henry VIII; in 1998 she wrote Elizabeth the Queen; in 2001 she wrote Henry VIII, in 2009 she wrote The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn; in 2011 she wrote Mary Boleyn: The Mistress of Kings; and in 2016 she wrote Katherine of Aragon: The True Queen. That's nearly 30 years of telling and retelling the story of Henry's fascination with, marriage to, and destruction of Anne Boleyn and her family – roughly three times longer than Henry's own involvement lasted. Even the most charitable reader would have good cause to think this author could not possibly write anything more about this Tudor wife. And yet here's a new 500-page novel.
Anne Boleyn: A King's Obsession is the second installment in Weir's projected novel-sequence fictionalizing the lives of all of Henry's wives. The first book, devoted to Catherine of Aragon, was as stoic and severely elegant as its subject, but again: what can possibly be done with Anne Boleyn? What possible justification can there be for once again staging the morality play of her grasping little life? Even when the great Henry VIII biographer Francis Hackett wrote his own Anne novel back in 1939, critics carped about a surfeit of such books, and it's not like the tide has slackened in the ensuing decades. In 1949 Margaret Campbell Barnes wrote her jewel-like Brief Gaudy Hour; in 1963 Norah Lofts rendered the story in The Concubine; Jean Plaidy starred Anne in two novels, The King's Secret Marriage and The Lady in the Tower; in 2001 Philippa Gregory wrote her bestselling novel The Other Boleyn Girl, which was about Mary Boleyn and prominently featured a brittle, shrewish Anne who somehow yet managed to be a bit sympathetic; countless other novels major and minor have appeared after and between these publishing events, including Suzannah Dunn's The Queen of Subtleties, Anne Clinard Barnhill's At the Mercy of the Queen, Natalie Kelly's The Queen's Betrayal. And of course the most recent publishing phenomenon featuring Anne Boleyn has been Hilary Mantel's two novels starring Henry's devious minister Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, in both of which we see a classic, extremely memorable turn of Anne-as-villain.
There is, therefore, a glut of Anne Boleyn novels and little conceivable reason to add another to the pile, even if it's part of a series and even if it's written by a popular historian. What more can be said? What possible new approach can an author bring to the subject? The inherent allure of the Anne Boleyn story is epitomized in the charges that Cromwell and his catspaws brought against her, specifically that charge of incest with her brother George. The incest charge, like the later embroiderings of witchcraft charges, tips the prosecution's hand. It's overreach of a kind that can only be born of personal hatred, and it thereby introduces into the very groundwater of Anne's outward story the possibilities of inward ones history will never know.
There are infinite gradations possible in that inward story, but historical novelists are fairly straightforward creatures, so they tend to pick either one end of the spectrum or the other: either the theatricality of the charges against her means Anne was totally innocent, or it means she was totally guilty. Generally speaking, when it comes to Anne Boleyn historical novels, those are your two choices.In Anne Boleyn: A King's Obsession, Anne is totally innocent. She comes back from France buoyant at the prospect of showing the dowdy English court a bit of Continental flash, and when her sister confronts her about making a spectacle of herself, Anne responds, basically, by stating her intention to make herself a character in a Tudor historical novel:
“You're English born and bred, like George and me,” I said flatly. “And I was brought up at the French court just like you. Why do you always have to pretend to be different?”“Because everyone has to be something.”“What d'you mean?”“Every woman has to have something which singles her out, which catches the eye, which makes her the center of attention. I am going to be French.”
But although she's vain and headstrong, she's nothing worse. In her Afterword, Alison Weir mentions the fact that she's been investigating the rise of a kind of proto-feminism during the Tudor era, and tendrils of this idea creep into the narrative, always with anachronisms in all directions. “I don't give a fig for the Cardinal or the King! I want answers!” Anne rants after learning that she's been forbidden to see Harry Percy. “I am going to make them understand that no one trifles with Anne Boleyn!” (“She was beside herself,” Weir helpfully adds; despite the fact that Anne's personal motto was at one time “The Most Happy,” she spends most of the novel beside herself.)
Since this is fiction of a decidedly modern cast, Anne's declaration that she doesn't give a fig about the King doesn't get her banished from Court or thrown in the Tower. Instead, it endears her to Henry, and the novel embarks in steady, predictable paces on dramatizing the protracted game of personal chess the two lovers played for the better part of a decade. Whether we're being given Saint Anne or Sinner Anne, the progress of that relationship, the wary drawing-together of these two fiercely independent personalities, must perforce form the heart of any such novel. Weir is a bit more languid in her pacing of this relationship than most fictionalizers of this story; in her version, even as late as 1532, when the couple learns about the death of that inveterate enemy of their legal union, Archbishop Warham, they're feeling very different things for each other:
“I should be mourning the old man, but he's of no more use to God than he ever was to me,” Henry said, clasping Anne and whirling her around in his joy. “No one can say no to us now, darling! I'm nominating Cranmer to the See of Canterbury this very night. I'm going through the motions with Rome, so that none in Christendom can challenge my new Archbishop.”… Henry was looking at Anne as if he might devour her. She met his gaze and read in it years of pent-up desire. Outside the open window behind him, the sun was descending behind the trees, casting soft, radiant light on an enchanted world and on his red-gold hair. They were alone on this balmy summer evening. Henry took a step toward her and she went into his arms.“I love you, Anne.” His voice was heavy with passion. “Be mine, darling! There is nothing to stop us now.”Why not? She thought, her cheek against the rough gold thread of his doublet, her arms twined around his broad torso. We have denied ourselves for so long! And if I do not love him as he loves me, I have at least been aroused by him.
When it comes to such a long-sought moment, on which the course of so much European history hinges, readers might hope for something with a bit more dramatic kick to it than “Why not?” And this isn't the only point in the novel where Weir exhibits a curious tone-deafness, an oddly matter-of-fact way of letting the import of a scene hit the floorboards like a dropped dictionary. Once Henry and Anne are finally wed, for instance, she decides to pleasure him in bed with French-learned methods for which the study of theology has not prepared Henry. He's, eh, effusively appreciative at first, but then he becomes stern, asking her where she learned to do such things (as if there could be any doubt – some things never change) and gently chiding her:
“Darling,” Henry said, “if we are to get a son, that is not the way to go about it. And the Church frowns on practices like that. But I appreciate your wanting to please me. You do that best when you allow me inside you.”“Then I am your Grace's to command,” she said lightly, knowing she had miscalculated badly. Never again would she take the lead in bed with him.Henry kissed her. “Remember that!” he said, his tone warmer.
And that's that. No court of appeals.It certainly doesn't help matters that Weir's Anne, like all Saint Annes, is a bit of a dolt. Saint Annes almost have to be: if they were sharp enough to understand any aspect of their own tragedy, they'd be sharp enough to understand all of it. When Anne gives Henry a daughter and then a couple of miscarried sons, he reacts with an angry tension that occasionally erupts into sexual violence, and after one such encounter, Anne is surprised to find Henry remorseful – and, in Weir's handling, comes to the exact wrong conclusion immediately:
Suddenly she felt his hand on her heaving shoulder. “Anne? I apologize if I was abrupt with you. It may not be your fault that our sons have died, but its it mine? Have I offended God in some way? In faith, I am so angry, so confused, and so frustrated. I am a plain man, and sometimes a rough one.” He sighed. “I wonder what has happened to us. Where we lost each other.”… Relief flooded through her. She still had power over him!
There are some nefarious doings, but Anne is innocent of all of them. In 1536 when the Court learns of the death of Queen Catherine, Anne is relieved that this long-standing threat to what she still perceives as her married security with Henry is now at last gone. She tells as much to dear brother George, who responds by twirling his mustachios:
“I cannot thank God sufficiently,” [Anne] said. “If we needed proof that He smiles on us, this is it.”
“Sometimes He needs a little assistance in working His will,” George observed.“What do you mean?” she asked sharply, sitting up to face him.“He helps those who help themselves.”Horror gripped her. “Brother, what are you trying to say to me?”
“I think you know, Anne.” He smiled at her. “A few well-chosen herbs …”
Anne goes to her trial, her condemnation, her imprisonment, and finally her execution with a humble purity worthy of Joan of Arc. In fact, even beyond her execution; Weir hasn't only been researching Tudor proto-feminism, you see – she's also been looking into whether or not there might be any plausibility to the age-old folklore about the lopped-off heads of prisoners blinking or grimacing or trying to speak. “Death is not instantaneous: every element survives decapitation,” she quotes one expert opining. “It is a savage vivisection.” Margaret George, in her 1992 novel about Mary Queen of Scots, takes a few pages to follow Mary's soul as it leaves her body after her execution. Weir is content just to follow Anne's head:
She was aware of tasting [blood] in her mouth and of its flooding her nostrils as she felt her head, horribly light now, hit the scaffold with a painful thud and the blindfold fall away. She would have cried out, yet no sound came apart from a terrible, silent gurgling, and she wanted to clamp her hands to the mortal wound that had been dealt her, yet she had no hands anymore. They were attached to the dark, bloodied, crumpled thing that lay on the scaffold next to her. She blinked and tried to look away.
Anne Boleyn: A King's Obsession has a sharper, faster tone than the preceding volume in this series, but it shares with Katherine of Aragon: The True Queen one essential element – neither book is willing to countenance a single substantial wrong on the part of its main subject. This might have felt like a virtuous duty when dramatizing a martyr like Catherine, but it's a work of acrobatics when dealing with a character like Anne. It'll be a lead-pipe cinch in the next volume, with Jane Seymour, but who knows? Maybe Weir will take a page from Hilary Mantel's book and give us a Jane Seymour with thorns. In the meantime, the saints come marching in.